Never too late – Sport and Development for older people

Episode 13 is on sport and development for older people, an often forgotten demographic in this field.

Firstly, the pod is one person down, as Sara is off in Malawi on her monitoring and evaluation trip. However, she has made time to phone in and give us an update on her work so far.

Next we hear from Colin Milner, CEO and Founder of the International Council on Active Ageing. ICAA’s mission is to promote Active Aging as a solution to improving the quality of life for older adult. We speak to Colin about the missed opportunity of not properly segmenting the older people audience, how physical activity can ensure older people are engaged in life and some good practice examples from around the globe. You can follow Colin on twitter here – @colinmilner.

Then we hear from Tony Jameson-Allen, CEO and Founder of Sporting Memories. This is a UK based initiative to encourage older people especially those living with dementia to use sport as a tool for reminiscence. The sessions also now include physical activity as well. We discuss with Tony some of the challenges of measuring progress, how the sessions work and also the efforts to increase knowledge and understanding of how to ensure events are dementia friendly. We would also like to congratulate Sporting Memories for being shortlisted for the Sports Journalist Associations ‘Sport for Social Change’ award. You can follow Tony on twitter here – @tja_evonet

Lee and Dave then discuss their views on the interviews and their experience in this field. Clearly, there’s a huge opportunity with an inactive population, but also a population that has many demographic subsets that require an analytical approach. Potentially, it’s not quite as glamorous as working with children, but there are huge benefits of sport and development to both the individuals and easing the strain on health and social care systems.

Finally, we would love to hear from projects who are working with groups of older adults. How do you attract different groups, how do you maintain participation and what hints and tips do you have?

Lee is off on a couple of very exciting sports and development projects in Jordan and Nepal so our schedule might be a bit erratic in the lead up to Christmas, but we will be bringing you updates from the field soon.